


(love nothing)

by jockohomo



Category: Le Comte de Monte-Cristo | Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Post-Canon, Reunions, danglars is miserable
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-27
Updated: 2019-12-27
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:49:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21982444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jockohomo/pseuds/jockohomo
Summary: If Jullian Danglars had been told five years ago that he would, before his sixtieth birthday, waste the final vestiges of his fortune on a subpar carriage ride, he would have laughed. He would have all but thrown the offending party out of his house. He certainly would not have believed it.Of course, the Danglars of five years ago could hardly have predicted that he would one day be rendered bankrupt, kidnapped, robbed, and starved, and then dumped unceremoniously on the side of a road somewhere in northern Italy. The Danglars of 1845, however, had been forced to believe it, and he certainly was not laughing.The Danglars of 1845 was very wet, very cold, and very nearly out of options.
Relationships: Gaspard Caderousse/Baron Danglars
Kudos: 11





	(love nothing)

**Author's Note:**

> cad lives AU! yay!
> 
> content warnings for implied/mentioned suicide (plus general death) and mentions of alcohol.

If Jullian Danglars had been told five years ago that he would, before his sixtieth birthday, waste the final vestiges of his fortune on a subpar carriage ride, he would have laughed. He would have all but thrown the offending party out of his house. He certainly would not have believed it.

Of course, the Danglars of five years ago could hardly have predicted that he would one day be rendered bankrupt, kidnapped, robbed, and starved, and then dumped unceremoniously on the side of a road somewhere in northern Italy. The Danglars of 1845, however, had been forced to believe it, and he certainly was not laughing. 

The Danglars of 1845 was very wet, very cold, and very nearly out of options. 

When he had first recollected his senses, his first decision had been to flee Italy as fast as he had entered it, as far away from those damned bandits as possible; after all, Monte Cristo — the self-proclaimed agent of God himself, demon though Danglars was sure he was — had seen to it that his debts were paid, so even if he had little to his name in the way of finances, he at least no longer had a reason to fear the law. Besides, his grasp of the Italian language was hilariously inept at best, and if he were to suffer he would rather do so in a country whose language he understood.

He knew he would avoid Marseille and Paris, but other than that, he was aimless. It was somewhere around Lyon where he realized that he would be much better off if he were to find himself an ally; he had considered it before, of course, but who had he left to rely on? Morcerf had put a bullet through his own head; Villefort was locked up in some unholy cell, mind even further from reach; the elder Cavalcanti was a fraud and had departed from France notwithstanding; the younger was apparently imprisoned; even those of his friends who were alive and well would doubtlessly shirk away from the possibility of tainting their reputation by mixing with his, tarnished as it was. 

It came to him very suddenly one afternoon, when he had seated himself to contemplate the tear that was gradually spreading its way up the right leg of his trousers.

He had dined together with Edmond Dantès before being returned his freedom, and the devilish man across from him (who hadn’t really been eating anyways) mentioned innocuously — it had seemed innocuous, at least, but nothing the Count of Monte Cristo said was ever innocuous, surely — that their old friend Gaspard Caderousse had started himself an inn in Belgium, so close to the border that it was nearly in France. Last Danglars had heard Caderousse’s inn was in some corner of their birth country, but then, that had been decades ago. 

Caderousse had come to him for help, back then, and Danglars had turned him away; but Caderousse had always been more easily swayed than Danglars, and besides, Danglars was desperate and bedraggled enough now to appeal to sympathy. Surely he could be convinced.

Danglars had to believe he would be convinced.

So it was a quiet afternoon in early fall that Danglars decided to set off for Belgium. It took him longer than anticipated, mostly because he had a tendency of getting himself turned around the wrong direction — he was quite sure he reached the English Channel at one point — but he made it to Belgium eventually.

The concerning thing was the fees necessary to pay his way across the country, especially with all his detours. He had been left with at least a livable amount of money, yet by the time he crossed into Belgium it had taken everything he had left and some bootlicking just to curl up in the back of a shoddy old carriage and allow himself to be jostled down the dark path, cheek pressed slickly against the condensated window and head pounding with the sound of the rain. It was a last-ditch attempt at scrounging up some sort of life for himself; if Caderousse turned him out into the rain, he would have nowhere left to go, no money left to get there. He would be forced to resign himself to abject squalor — either that, or take drastic measures. Both options terrified Danglars enough to make him avoid the thought entirely.

As if he were suffering from a shortage of dreads already — why, the Monte Cristo affair had him paranoid enough, and he still wondered if the Count himself would appear from a nearby shadow and condemn him again for some slight or another. No, Danglars was sure he had gone through quite enough by now; whatever Caderousse had to offer had better be worth his troubles. 

The carriage came to a sudden halt, sending him upwards and causing the side of his face to smack against the damaged surface of the window. Danglars gave a low, pained moan and pressed his hand to his cheek. 

“Arrived,” the driver called flippantly back to him. 

Danglars gritted his teeth. _I can tell, idiot._ His nerves were too frayed for him to say as much, though; he stepped out and gave the driver a curt nod, dismissing him back along the road.

The sky had rapidly darkened since Danglars boarded his last ride; now he was left alone in the cold rain, with nothing but his thoughts and whatever creatures were out tonight to keep him company. With the carriage gone he found himself staring at the row of structures across the street, mostly enveloped in shadows from where he stood. It was all too easy to imagine a pursuer emerging from there, ready to strike him down, to drag him away to some awful fate. He turned clumsily on his heel.

The inn rose starkly out of the ground before him, separated by only the muddy lawn and the path leading up to the steps. It was difficult to discern much in the meager light of the street lamps, but he could make out the gray stone that comprised its walls, the wooden sign hanging above the door. The window next to it was alit but dim, and he could make out tables, chairs, seemingly devoid of people. Perhaps the guests had all gone to bed, late as it was. He could only hope that Caderousse, for whatever reason, had not; he could only hope that Caderousse was in a favorable mood. 

But hoping would do him no good at this point. Danglars inhaled the cold autumn air, felt his heart hammering at the inside of his ribcage like the rain thrumming against the dirt around him, and made his way up to the doorstep. He managed to drag himself through multiple ankle-deep puddles along the way, and by the time he arrived, his shoes were soaked through.

Danglars was not the most religious of men, but he muttered a prayer anyways and rapped his knuckles against the wooden door. He heard the scrape of a chair against the floor and heavy footsteps, then a period of silence. Finally, the door swung open.

He realized, after a moment, that he was staring into the tanned skin of a man’s clavicles.

Danglars took a hasty step back, tilted his head upwards, and was immediately greeted by a grin full of glinting, white teeth. The rest of the man was in the shadow of the doorway, and it wasn’t until he stepped forward that Danglars could make out a pair of narrowed eyes, a thick, curling beard, dark hair cut short and messy, a large nose that seemed like it had been broken once before. There was something intimidating about the way he held himself. Danglars’ face was immediately flushed.

It took him a moment to realize that this figure was Caderousse. By the time he had, the other man’s smile had disappeared. His eyes were cold and dangerous.

An anxious laugh escaped Danglars. “Old friend…” he started, and then immediately trailed off into another. He had rehearsed this reunion more times than he could count, for lack of other pastimes, had gone over what he would say to Caderousse upon arrival so often that it was nauseating, but the words all escaped him now, and he was left with the fleeting fear that Monte Cristo had paid the man off, that he was about to meet the same fate he had so preciously feared — that he had traveled all this way just to be murdered.

He was about to back away (and take quite a tumble down the stairs, no doubt) when Caderousse’s grin returned and Danglars found a hand grasping the damp collar of his shirt and pulling him inside.

“Oh, my dear old friend!”

Danglars’ eyes widened, barely conscious of the fact that he was now inside the inn, of the door shutting behind him. Caderousse’s voice was almost loud, and certainly happier than he had seemed moments before. In fact —

“You must have been freezing out there, old boy!” he exclaimed, giving Danglars a hearty pat on the shoulder that quite nearly sent him staggering. “Last I heard, you were a baron — why, how strange it is to see you here, all torn and miserable! You look quite half-drowned.”

“Ah, yes — hello.” Danglars was too surprised to be really annoyed at the reminder of his own physical state of disarray. Where he would have gritted his teeth, he instead found himself nearly gaping. “Really, I am surprised you recognize me.”

“Oh, we knew each other so intimately,” Caderousse replied, voice low and dismissive. “I could never forget those eyes.”

“Yes, those were … such pleasant days, weren’t they…” Danglars found another nervous laugh wringing its way out of him.

“Come now, are you thirsty?”

“Am I — well, yes, I suppose so.”

“Follow me, then.” Danglars was given little choice in the matter; Caderousse had draped an arm over his shoulders and was very much herding him toward the stairs. Conspiratorially, he added, “I have some wine in my room, you know. Personal repertoire.”

Danglars had half a mind to argue — surely Caderousse had plenty of the stuff kept supplied downstairs, where guests frequented — but then, he could hardly find the voice to speak at all, let alone put up a fight. Besides, it had been decades since they had last seen each other, hadn’t it? Of course Caderousse would like to speak to him in the privacy of his room, where there was little to no chance that they would be intruded upon by some wandering guest.

Caderousse’s room lied up a couple flights of wooden stairs; once or twice they creaked underfoot, and Danglars felt chills rising up his spine. As far as he could tell, there were no other guest rooms on this floor; what wasn’t the innkeeper’s room seemed to be devoted to a storage room of sorts. It was then that he began to ponder the whereabouts of La Carconte; he had quite forgotten her existence, pathetic wench that she was, but now that he considered the thing she seemed entirely absent. Perhaps her illness had finally claimed her.

The room itself was tidy enough. It was clear that Caderousse did not spend much thought on cleanliness in his private space, but he didn’t seem to be in possession of much in the ways of personal belongings. His bed was pressed up underneath the window in the furthest corner of the room, unmade; his closet was shut; the table placed beside his bed supported nothing but a lamp, a clock, and a half-empty glass of something. The only other furniture in the room was a wooden chair with a faded green cushion and an almost-empty bookshelf — Danglars could not make out the titles of the few volumes placed there, but he could feel the threadbare carpet through his thin shoes, could see the way the curtains fell limply around the window. It was strange; the rest of the inn, as far as he could tell, did not seem nearly so sad.

“Jullian,” Caderousse said, and the man in question felt himself shudder, “you have no idea how dearly I have missed those days, back in Marseille. You know I always did adore you.”

Danglars did not hear Caderousse locking the door behind them.

“Truly, it has been too long,” Danglars began, turning to face the man whom he had condemned, once, in another life, and whom he might have loved before even that. “It does my heart good to see you looking well — ”

Caderousse slapped him across the face.

Danglars had been nowhere near expecting the blow, had hardly even registered it coming when he glimpsed it, and hot, stinging pain immediately spread across his face. The Caderousse of his memory was not so strong, not so hardened by years of what must have been hard labor to have a punch like this; if Danglars had not been expecting the blow, he most certainly had not been expecting for it to topple him. Yet it did topple him. He was weakened from days of travel, from rationing out his food, exhausted from sleepless nights spent pacing the floors of inns far dingier than this, and so the force of the slap robbed him of his balance. He stumbled over backwards and before he had the time to react, Danglars found himself sitting unceremoniously on the floor, hands gripping the carpet behind him and legs drawn halfway up at his front.

Caderousse’s face had transformed; where there was congeniality and carefully portrayed adoration before, there was now something else. His lips had pulled back into something like a snarl — his _teeth_ , his teeth were damn near _carnivorous_ — and his eyes had narrowed into a glint.

“What do you want from me?” the beast snapped. “What right do you have to come back to me, after all these years? Who do you think you are?”

Danglars’ throat was gripped with terror, pounding, raging, urging him to move but freezing him where he sat; he raised an arm to cover his face and found that it was shaking. “Caderousse, please,” he gasped as soon as he had reclaimed the ability to talk, mind racing against him. “Please do not kill me — I … I have connections — surely there is something that would benefit you more than my death!”

Caderousse’s face morphed gleefully, and he gave a low, cruel laugh. Immediately, Danglars found a foot driven into his stomach. He coughed, hunching pathetically against the floor, but at the same time — at the same time, something was wrong. If Caderousse was capable of dealing the blow from before, then certainly he could hurt Danglars more if he wished — surely there was worse in him than the kick he had just administered. In Danglars’ mind, though, this was a death sentence.

“Answer my questions,” the man above him ordered, voice dropping to a growl.

“Y-yes — of course… Please — ”

“Tell me why you have chosen to come here, you sniveling, traitorous little bastard.”

So he didn’t intend to kill Danglars after all. Danglars _hoped_ not, at least, and elected to push himself forward onto his knees, gripping the right leg of Caderousse’s pants with a tremulous hand. “Please… please, all I need is a place to stay,” he choked. “I have not come here to ask anything else of you!”

Caderousse’s face remained acrimoniously distorted. “And what do you think gives you the right to show your face to me again?”

Danglars’ fingers tightened. “Gaspard… Old friend…”

Caderousse wrenched his leg free and gave Danglars another rough kick — to the shoulder this time, and just as muted as before. It still caused the lower man to cry out.

“You lost the right to speak that name a long time ago.” Caderousse spat on the ground. “Now _answer_ , you rat. Tell me why you think you deserve any hospitality from me after all that you, treacherous creature, have done.”

Danglars moved a hand to clutch his shoulder and looked up at him. This was too much — his own physical weakness, the utter ruin that had been wrought onto his life, Caderousse standing there with his hateful eyes and his cutting words — it was all _too much_. The thing was ridiculous, and Danglars found himself blurting, “Do you really think I would come to you if I had not exhausted every other possibility? What has possessed you?”

Caderousse’s movements were just as quick as before; he reached down, burying his fingers into Danglars’ shirt collar and yanking the other man close to his face. “Is that the sort of attitude you assume when begging for your life, Jullian?”

The motion was enough to sap Danglars of his defiance; he found himself cringing fearfully under Caderousse’s grip. “My apologies,” he gasped wildly, “oh, Caderousse, forgive me — oh, god, please, god, Caderousse, have mercy — ”

He was expecting Caderousse to snarl, or strike him again, or throw him to the floor, but instead the man laughed. He raised his chin and stretched his lips out and _laughed_ , with that same, cruel noise as before, and Danglars could feel flecks of spit landing on his face, his cheeks, his lips. His voice was low as he asked, “And for what reason should I not toss you back to the street, where you belong?”

That was it, then. That was his last hope exhausted. That was the final crack of the blade, the threat of _drastic measures_. Danglars wet his lips; he had not slept in days.

“If that is what you intend to do, then … kill me yourself. It would be better than such a fate.”

For a moment, everything was still; for a moment, everything ceased to be. Danglars swallowed tiredly and raised his eyes, weary and doubtful, to gaze upon Caderousse.

All the color had drained from the man’s face. His lips were pressed into a thin line.

“... Look,” Caderousse said, finally, heaving a great sigh and running a hand through his own thick, curling hair. “I will allow you to stay for tonight. We can discuss this tomorrow morning.”

The tension immediately seeped from Danglars’ body; Caderousse’s grip disappeared, and he found himself collapsing against the ground, spent. His throat ached. “Thank you… Thank you, old friend.”

“Shut your mouth,” Caderousse snapped, brushing off his pants. “Tonight, you sleep on the floor.”

Danglars did as he was told and fell silent. He accepted Caderousse’s sentencing, accepted the threadbare carpet, accepted the glass of water, the pillow and the blanket that he was, after a few minutes’ hesitation, provided. He fell asleep there, curled around himself pathetically on the floor; he was not awake long enough to hear Caderousse’s breath hitching unevenly as he sat on the side of his bed, back hunched and face in his hands. He did not hear Caderousse’s footfall as he paced the floor into the next morning.

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from 'take it easy (love nothing)' by bright eyes. with every tcomc fic i write, danglars suffers a little bit more, rip
> 
> https://gaspardcaderousse.tumblr.com/


End file.
